A brief history of the 'original American whiskey' and the cocktail that brought it back from the dead

Walk into any trendy New York City bar today and you'll almost
certainly find a variety of bourbons and Scotches on the shelf
and a handful of whiskey-fueled cocktails on the menu.

But it was not until recently that the one type of whiskey that
industry buffs consider the "original American whiskey" began to
see its own resurgence.

That whiskey is rye, and Matt Eisenman, a brand ambassador for
the Vermont rye company WhistlePig, explained to us
how one cocktail made it happen.

It starts with George Washington.

The story begins back in the late 1700s, when George Washington
began distilling rye whiskey at his Mount Vernon plantation.
(Today,
Mount Vernon Distilleries has recreated a rye whiskey based
on what it believes was Washington's original recipe).

Rye was a cold-weather grain, Eisenman said, that flourished in
the Northeast.

The English brought barley with them when they originally came to
America, but that didn't grow well in the Northeast and
mid-Atlantic where they first landed, he said.

The Dutch, however, brought rye, which flourished. (Rum, brought
by the English from the West Indies, was a more popular drink at
first, but it was no longer an option after independence.)

As people migrated south, they found that corn grew best in
places like Kentucky and Tennessee, which led to bourbon's
emergence in those places. But elsewhere, rye was the name of the
game.

Then came the cocktails.

In the late 1800s, the cocktail scene began to take off in
America.

Central to all the original cocktail recipes — the
Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, and later, the Sazerac – was
rye whiskey. (The Sazerac was originally made with brandy but
switched to rye in the 1870s, Eisenman said).

Bartenders started using
rye whiskey in the Sazerac in the 1870s.Judi
Bottoni/AP

It's important to note that bartending was deemed a very
honorable profession at that time, and most people spent a lot of
their time in bars. In Eisenman's words:

They had sermons in the bar; you could have town-hall meetings in
the bar. The bar in the 1700 and 1800s was a place where people
from out of town would stay ... It was the hub of all
information, so the bartender was the gatekeeper of all
information.

It was not until the mid- to late-20th century that bartending
began to lose its prestige as a profession and became something
people did between jobs or to make money on the side, Eisenman
said.

A blow to rye.

During World War I and World War II, the US government subsidized
corn. That, for obvious reasons, dealt a major blow to the rye
whiskey industry.

Then after World War II and through the 1960s, '70s, and '80s,
vodka and gin began taking over the US liquor market.

Eisenman credits this to James Bond movies and the double-agent
character's affinity for gin martinis.

James Bond's affinity for
martinis (shaken, not stirred) probably contributed to the surge
in popularity of vodka and gin through the '60s and
'70s.AP

The "three martini lunch" became such a popular trend among
American business executives that presidents Kennedy and Carter
had to
crack down on the phenomenon.

So splashy vodka cocktails became commonplace in bars — think
Long Island Iced Tea and Sex on the Beach – and for the older
drinkers, blended Scotches started making their way into American
bars.

Needless to say, few people were drinking rye whiskey at the
time.

Craft distillers and master mixologists.

In the 1990s, craft-beer brewing started to take root — followed
shortly by craft whiskey distilling.

Craft distillers were able to experiment more because they were
distilling on a much smaller scale and aging their spirits for
shorter periods of time.

Around that time, bartending started to become more popular as a
profession once again, and the bar scene, more broadly, began to
stage a comeback.

Armed with social media and the power to brand themselves and
their bars, career bartenders today are considered almost the
same as celebrities.

Mixology is now a popular
profession for cocktail aficionados around the world. Mixologist
Jacques Bezuidenhout shakes up a cocktail in the Starlight Room
of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San
Francisco.Eric
Risberg/AP

"Bartenders get flown around the world to set up bars; they get
flown around the globe to teach about cocktails," Eisenman said.

In New York, bars like Milk & Honey, Death & Co.,
Attaboy, and Employees Only opened up, with "mixologists" for
bartenders, at the forefront of the "cocktail revolution."

The juices of the 1990s were replaced with bitters and natural
ingredients in cocktails. And bartenders started to re-create all
the original recipes.

Rye's comeback.

One cocktail — the Manhattan — epitomized that
revolution, and at the heart of its recipe was rye whiskey.

Rye had been "pretty much on its deathbed in 2006," Eisenman
notes. So the surge in popularity for rye-based cocktails in the
past five to 10 years has been huge for the industry.

WhistlePig master distiller Dave Pickerell saw the potential, and
he left Maker's Mark to get into rye.